A few months back a group of us (event organizers and production staff) began an email exchange with the TF2 team in an attempt to establish a more open channel of communication between the team and the competitive community. That dialogue spawned a request for a list of prioritized* feature requests that would most benefit the community, to which we responded that we’d benefit from:

A CS:GO-style stream list integrated into the main game menu

Matchmaking

Bug fixes/QOL improvements (some of which we gathered from this thread)

* taking into consideration both ease-of-implementation and magnitude of impact on the community

We were ultimately granted an opportunity to drop by and chat if we were in the neighborhood, so naturally we scrambled together a group of notable west-coasters (myself, extine, mana, b4nny, Seagull) to meet with the TF team.

That meeting was yesterday, and to our surprise…

...we’re getting all that we asked for.

I’m sure some of the nuances of the conversation (particularly regarding matchmaking) would get lost or misinterpreted in text, so I’m leaving the full debrief for this Friday’s Fully Charged episode which will feature a panel of meeting-attendees plus esports columnist Sam "oPlaiD" Lingle. Feel free to leave any questions you might have in the event thread and we'll answer them in the stream.

It’s 3 AM here and we’re all still wide awake from excitement, and if you’re reading this now, you should be too.

Get hyped!

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Quick edit/clarification:
Matchmaking was clearly already in the works prior to any mention by us. We're definitely not the ones putting things in motion here -- all credit goes to the TF2 team.